Nicholas Hopton, UK former ambassador to Iran, on latest US/Israel strikes

I was not alone, I don't think, in feeling that on Friday things were heading towards, in a very different direction. It has become clearer that the negotiations were not really a negotiation. There were demands by one side and the other side was facing these demands at the barrel of a gun. Now neither side in those circumstances was going to reach agreement, it seems, and that is the background to President Trump seemingly deciding to, with the encouragement of Prime Minister Netanyahu, to move ahead with military strikes and break off the negotiations. The trigger? Seems to have been the fact that the Americans understood at least where the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei would be at a certain time on Saturday and that probably accounted for the timing of the operation because they knew they could take him out and they decided to do that and then they also took out large other numbers of senior Iranian civilian military leaders."